Native Speaker (29 page)

Lately I keep seeing him in Lelia's arms, the way he looked so different from her when he was just born, the shock of his black hair, the delicate slips of his eyes. His face would change soon enough, but he looked so fully Korean then (if nothing like me), and Lelia, dead exhausted and only casually speaking, wondered aloud how she could pass him so little of herself. Of course it didn't concern her further. Though I kept quiet, I was deeply hurting inside, angry with the idea that she wished he was more white. The truth of my feeling, exposed and ugly to me now, is that I was the one who was hoping whiteness for Mitt, being fearful of what I might have bestowed on him: all that too-ready devotion and honoring, and the chilly pitch of my blood, and then all that burning language that I once presumed useless, never uttered and never lived.

It is twilight again, and Lelia sits on the bed as I dress. My nightly departure. When we get to this point in the evening I suddenly forget the happy, earlier hours. I'm too live. I think I can see danger everywhere, the way it used to be around here. After Mitt died, it was like we were wading knee-deep in kerosene. Suddenly your speech is a match. A wrong word from either of us and whoom! Now, Lelia rises and helps me with my tie, tucking it beneath the back of my collar. She smooths the material with her fingertips. Her lips are pursed, though not tight, and they can work well enough to say
be careful
and lightly kiss my ear. From the bed she picks up my jacket and walks with me across the length of the apartment, to the front door. She holds the coat out for me and I take it. She says love you and I say love you back. No fuss or romance. We've long tired of goodbyes.

* * *

Soon I see Jack again, this time at a diner around the corner from Hoagland's flat. He is sick with the last of the season's flu, running a low-grade fever, body aches. He says he's having crap attacks. No one is taking care of him. We sit in a booth near the washroom. When the waiter comes he orders a gyro platter and a side of pepperoncini and coffee. I just want tea.

“You look very chipper, Parky. What, have you eaten already?”

“With Lelia,” I answer. “You look like shit.”

“I feel like shit. Why not? This is a good time for it. I hate this transitional weather. Is that what Dennis calls it?”

“You're delirious. Go home.”

“No,” he says, holding a glass of ice water to his head. “I am here already. I am hungry, finally. You will not eat with me? I am buying the food tonight.”

“No.”

“Ah, the chipper young man says no. You are looking very chipper,” he says, now drinking the whole glass in one pull. He calls the waiter in Greek and his glass is refilled. He drinks it all and calls the waiter again, who grumbles something to Jack and just leaves the pitcher.

“What did he say?” I ask.

“That he was not my whore tonight. He also suggested I was a faggot. Also likely a cheapskate.”

“He hardly said three syllables.”

“Greek is a very special language,” Jack answers. “You understand these are rough translations.”

The waiter comes around with our coffee and tea. He acts as if nothing has happened and goes away.

“I love the service in this city,” Jack says, his forehead sweating now. He wipes his face with a napkin. “Very special all around. I must tell you, my friend, that you are being appreciated again. The talk is good.”

“This must mean Dennis.”

“Yes,” he says, smelling his coffee. “I love seeing you, Parky, but in truth you are right. I should be at home, in bed. But Dennis, he is so urgent with things. He is like a human bladder. One can always go if one wants, yes? The question is timing, appropriateness, convenience . . .”

“Jack, go home.”

“Dennis would have my head,” he says, coughing a little. “I promised I would meet with you. It is fine. I knew that when I refused any more of his fieldwork, this would be my job until retirement.”

“Tailing unreliables.”

“Parky. Listen to me. Everything is fine. Dennis is satisfied again with the registers,” he says, his voice hoarse. “I read your stuff myself. Professional material. Very excellent. I made Dennis admit it. And your analysis of the bombing, at least, was inventive. You understand he cannot use it in his final reports. He says it is not written after our style. Nothing like our style. But he is not angry about it.”

I tell Jack that finesse is not a concept that agrees with him. He nods in admission. In that day's register, I'd written that in the absence of actual events, it was likely that Glimmer & Company itself was involved in the manufacturing of happenings, creating intrigue and complication for the sake of extending funded research. Certainly, I knew that Hoagland would strike out that part of the day's entry, but it didn't matter because I had meant it only for him; it was true insofar as it was possible, which is enough for anyone in our line. More than anything, I was sending a personal note to Dennis, to say that whatever I was giving him should be considered, for his purposes, to be suspect, mistold prose. Perhaps you can't trust Henry Park, I wanted him to think, you can't abide anymore what he now sees and says.

Jack tells me, “There could be more material in Dennis' view, but I am telling him you are doing your best.”

“He'll get two more weeks,” I say. “That's the schedule. Then it's over.”

“Dennis thinks you will come back.”

“Dennis is wrong.”

“This is the hope, of course,” Jack answers. “But then I have never known him to be. He is mad, Parky, a brilliant liar and a cheat and a fool, but he has also never been wrong. I have known him for many years. He always wins the game, if only because he knows how large and wide it truly is. People like us can see just a small part of things. This is inescapable. We are just good immigrant boys, so maybe we don't care. What you and I want is a little bit of the good life. If we work hard, and do not question the rules too much, we can get a piece of what they have.”

“What is that, Jack?”

“Are you kidding?” he cries. “Just look at yourself. Look at your beautiful American wife. Look at the many things you have, how you can go anyplace you want and speak your mind.”

“But I don't,” I say. “I've forgotten how, if I ever knew. Then, when someone like Kwang attempts anything larger, there's instant suspicion. Someone must step up and pay to send in us hyenas. We'll sniff him out. We eat our own, you know.”

Jack shakes his head. “You are difficult, boy. Okay. So listen to me anyway. Listen to me on the matter of these two weeks, Parky. There is still some concern.”

“It doesn't matter to me anymore. Listen, Jack. This is my mind finally speaking.”

“Come on,” he says. He clears his throat. “The question is, what is Parky going to do now. You are a grown man. You must want control back, yes? This began as your task and it should be yours to the end.”

I don't answer.

“You can have the knowledge of ending cleanly,” he says. He coughs, hacking away from the table. “I had the chance once. Now I will retire with too many memories.”

I am not certain of the virtue of what he says, but I don't disagree. For some time now I have been operating under the thesis that Jack is under extreme pressures of his own—whether because of me or not doesn't seem to matter—and that he is working without regard to my best interests. No illusions for us. I don't blame him, for I would do the same. I am fond of Jack, and to the end I will strictly believe that he has much feeling for me. It does not matter what he does to me, or I to him, for what other friends can we hope to have? With strange souls like us, who must have opposite hearts from you, treachery is more sweetly served by our dearest than by arch-strangers we never see.

His dinner comes. He folds the shaved meat and peppers into the pita and takes huge bites of the roll. He slurps at his coffee.

“Dennis requests one thing,” he says, still chewing his food. “Hear me out before you say anything. I will do my job tonight for Dennis if it kills me. He wants the remaining registers, of course. Do this please. But this thing that you are working on. This money club. This is important.”

“I've made my report on it. He already knows what it is and what it isn't.” I had written that Kwang took no profits and made no interest, that he just redistributed funds at the end of every week, like any
ggeh
.

“Yes, I know, Parky. Now Dennis would like an additional item. You have offered some useful facts and analysis but he requires material. You say you regularly make printouts of the list of club members for Kwang. Good. Now make one for us. You will do this?”

I think of the list of Kwang's people. His best and most loving. In some way I see it as the expression of the past seven years of his life, who he has been at the camp meetings and rallies, at the picnics and races and high school wrestling matches. I almost hear their voices as I open the envelopes, the stiff new bills that rush in to us in even greater tides now that he is publicly troubled, sounding out in marginal English their love for him, their devotion.

“Why does he want it?” I ask Jack.

“I do not ask such things,” he answers, already nearly finished with his meal. “I am happier with limited knowledge.”

“Propose something,” I ask, to push him into saying anything, which can always reveal. “For your friend.”

Jack wipes his mouth and sighs. “Okay, friend. Last week, two men were waiting for the elevator on our floor when I got out. I did not recognize them. I asked Candace who they were. She said they were Dennis' friends, from Arizona.”

“Dennis has no friends.”

“Right,” Jack replies. “So I assumed they were clients. But I tell you, Parky, I can smell that type right away.”

“What?”

“Cheap cologne and cheap shoes,” Jack says. “I noticed one of them was filling out an expense book. Of course I didn't ask Dennis. But it was clear. Baptiste thought so, too. You can ask him.
Federales
.”

“Government people?” I say.

“You add it up,” Jack says. “Now, if they were visiting Dennis because of Kwang, which I am not saying, then why? You say he is legitimate, except there is a minor fact of thousands of dollars coming in through the basement of his house every week.”

“I described every stage for you. I saw everything. It's clean.”

“Of course you did,” Jack says, waving his finger at me. “But look at this. This could be of keen interest to the revenue service. You say you redistribute almost all of the money. But maybe you don't know. He has lost a lot of money in some businesses, yes, since becoming a councilman? A small fortune. Maybe he thinks the people owe him something back. Maybe you are running just one of his money clubs, of which there are a dozen, or two dozen.”

“You and Dennis have all the angles.”

He laughs at me. “Dennis and I cannot fool you. Whatever you wish to believe about what happened at Kwang's office is your right. So remember this.
I
am the one who has been an arsonist and murderer, Parky, not Dennis. Dennis is not a man in that way. He is not
a doing
creature. He will falsely take credit whenever he can, big talker he is, but that is all. Now, I am seeing what you write of Kwang, the way you present him with something extra. It is evident that you cannot help yourself. Something takes you over. You must see how this is a ripe condition. So could it be that the honorable John Kwang is deceiving you, Parky, and not just the other way? Is it possible that through all of your genuine respect and admiration, he is using you?”

Jack spreads his hands on the table, his favored stance rhetorical. Of course I can't reply. He snorts and goes back to the rest of his plate of pepperoncini, taking them neatly like candies, one by one. When he's done he calls for more coffee and tea.

“I did not come to make trouble for you, Parky,” Jack tells me, taking my hand. “You can think I am right or I am crazy. Either way it will not hurt us, I hope. We are brothers, yes, Greek and Korean? Like it or not, Parky, ours is a family. Pete, Grace, the Jimmys. Me and you. I know it is a sad excuse for one, but what else do we have?”

“It's an orphanage, Jack,” I say. “And there's a Fagin.”

He shakes his head. “Whatever you say. I am not schooled. What I know is that America is not so open. People like you and me can only do what is necessary. We are not the ones who have the choices. Maybe we feel outside of things, and are smart enough, and we also know our own. So what is better, Parky, for who we are?”

“Nothing better,” I tell him.

“Right,” he says. “So you will please give us the list. Soon, yes? Dennis will probably like to send someone down for pickup.”

“I'm not sure what I can give you,” I answer.

“Well, you figure it out,” he says, with some finality. He takes out some bills to pay for dinner. He calls the waiter, who slowly walks over. Jack points up at him with his finger and says something, his tone suddenly sharp, raspy, and vicious. The waiter carefully takes the money and goes away without speaking.

We rise to leave. He folds up his wallet with his big hands.

“He spit in my coffee,” Jack says, watching the man walk every step to the register. “I told him I loved it. Now he will always wonder when this crazy Greek will come back for him.”

W
hen you are someone like me, you will be many people all at once. You are a father, a dictator, a servant, the most agile actor this land has ever known. And all throughout you must be the favorite chaste love of the people.

John Kwang tells me this. He tells me this at night when I work in the basement of the house. He tells me this when we walk the lovely empty 4
A.M.
streets of Flushing, and in the all-night Korean restaurants full of taxi drivers and dry cleaners, where we share plates of grilled short ribs and heated crocks of spicy intestine stew and lager imported from Seoul. He tells me these tips of survival as if preparing me for his rank, his position, his singular place in the city that he is letting slip from his grasp.

He is no longer moving in his customary way. He looks old and weary, like he's standing still. He decides to make a brief appearance for the media in the foyer of the ruined offices (against the repeated warnings of Janice, who hates the shot—all that shadowy wreckage and defeat), and with the barrage of questions and arc lights and auto winders he actually falters. Perhaps for the first time in his public life he mumbles, his voice cracks, and even an accent sneaks through. He doesn't seem to be occupying the office, the position. He gazes listlessly at the cameras and responds like a man stopped on the street, dutifully answering each part of each question, answering the follow-ups, searching through the mess of his emotions for reasons this could happen.

Total amateur hour, Janice grumbles to me. The only good thing, she says later, is that he finally steps down from the microphones before the volleys of questions about that morning's still unconfirmed news, which is that Eduardo Fermin was renting his own apartment in Manhattan. Otherwise, she adds, it might have been official, a complete meltdown. But they shout after him anyway as he makes his way out: how did a volunteer and night student afford $1,000 a month? How come even his parents didn't know? Who was he, and what was he doing, to have this other life?

In the next staff meeting, Janice gives us the official last word, come directly from John. He knows nothing about it. By my longtime habit and practice I put myself in Kwang's place, and I know it must be something with the
ggeh
, his paying of Eduardo, the apartment being a generous gift, what he thought his protégé deserved. I would have offered good Eduardo the same. There is, however, another notion, another idea steadily working itself through my thoughts: that perhaps Eduardo was taking money from John Kwang, stealing from him and his people, the very ones we are working for all day and all night.

I check what I can. I go back over Eduardo's records of the
ggeh
, the daily cash flows, every line of the ledgers. I check the rest of our political contributions. Nothing seems to be off, and what I'm beginning to realize is that Eduardo Fermin kept magnificent records and files. All this confounds me even more. I know that if there is complication in every assignment, a shift or turn that can newly show events in either shadow or light, this is the way our world has always been written. You must sail an expectedly treacherous course.

And yet for me, the mystery of a happening has no magic anymore, no natural draw. It is the graver thing I must seek, the dire constant, which I thought at first was simply John Kwang. It is him, too, for certain, but it's also the condition Jack has suggested. Revelations are not to be found in the far bend of the river, darkly hidden in the trees. There are no ready savages there, and never were. We make angels and devils of our own want and regard, improvising from ourselves along the way.

Though I cannot see that my business has directly brought Kwang to his trouble, I know that Hoagland is now busy recompiling my daily work, preparing it for his secret reader, who will do with it what he wishes. In my weaker moments, I imagine the client as a vastly wealthy voyeur, a decrepit, shut-away xenophobe who keeps a national vigilance on eminent agitators and ethnics. Of course he's more a collector than anything else, loving the pursuit too much, easily bored. But then I allow myself to see, and I flush with regret. I picture another client, the kind more numerous. I dread him, for he lives in the very mouth of the world; he knows its sweet and its stink, how to read any talk, and he will sift through my troubled affection for John Kwang with the soberest eyes.

Out in the world, John Kwang is falling. His name is diving in the polls; not just in one poll but across the board, the news-organization polls, the radio call-in polls, the 900-number talk show polls which you can call into and vote on what he should do. We know he still has plenty of supporters, but they're mostly silent, and the scope of the questions keeps growing. Reporters call everyone on the staff, phone us at the office, suggesting unceasingly how it must involve money, it must involve money.

You click them off as fast as you can. There's only a skeleton crew working, even during the day, when the hourly barrage of calls comes in. Requests and repeated requests, reporters at the basement door posing as utility men, utility women, they're at the point where they simply want to get inside the walls. Suddenly this has become enough for them, the new low standard, just to see where he's hiding, get the feel of the cell, the bunker.

I stay close to him, as Janice asks. Practically no one else sees him, sometimes Sherrie, though even she has begun to distance herself, drop away. More and more it is Janice who is directing the daily operations, actually there at the house urging the rest of us on. He has sent May and the boys and a helper to their other house, upstate. They don't have a television up there, they don't have a radio. They don't need to see their father like this.

I think John Kwang would be a man to keep his boys close, keep May even closer, that he would collect the four of them in one shut-away room and have them sleep and eat and bathe all together until the tempests subsided. His move is more what my father would do, what I have learned, too, through all of my life. To send people away or else allow them to go, that what is most noble to me is the exquisite gift of silence. My mask of serenity and repose.

Tonight, while I'm working in the makeshift rooms of his basement, he comes down the stairs in his plaid pajamas and white robe, with his hair pressed to a funny shape by sleep, and sits in the corner armchair with two goblets and a bottle of scotch.

“Byong-ho,” he now calls me, his voice like a bassoon. And he says in satori-accented Korean,
Hey you, arrogant youth, stop doing all that work and come drink with an elder
.

I rise and wheel the desk chair to the corner, take my glass, let him pour. I don't really drink, just let the liquor sting my tongue. I sit for him. His thick white robe is monogrammed, JK, in light blue stitched above his left breast, and for a moment, with the heavy drink in his hand, he almost looks like those men who lounge for hours in the locker room of a midtown university club and scratch their bared balls and watch FNN and pop cashews and snicker about black athletes and fool colleagues and all the fat-assed women they have loved. But John doesn't feature the polished ivory potbelly, the connected nests of body hair, a booming pepper-grinder voice; he'll sing instead. He always jury-rigs a folk song onto his stories. I don't know any of his songs, but it's the same register my mother used to hum while doing the housework, a languorous baritone, the most Korean range, low enough for our gut of sadness, high for the wonder of chance, good luck.

“Don't you know any Korean songs?” he asks.

“The only one is
Arirang
,” I tell him. “Then only the tune, and the first few words.”

John nods, rocking ever gently.

“Listen to the melody,” he says. He hums a few bars, to the first refrain. The tune, somehow, is immediately wrenching, its measures plead in near arpeggios, and like any good folk song it makes the voice of its singer sound lost, or forlorn, incomplete. “Imagine,” he goes on, “that
that
could be the spirit of an entire country. You do it.”

I sing the words until the second stanza, when I can't remember them.

Ah, yes
, John intones, his Korean accent getting thicker and heavier. I have some trouble understanding him. He leans back now, his slippered feet bobbing, the drink maybe getting to him, and he says,
You've almost got it, there, but something is still missing. You're cheating its sweetness. Let me show you. A different song now. A very old one I know
.

He sings with his eyes shut tight, the way I would see old Koreans praying in the front pews of Minister Cho's huge church, their fearsome bouts of concentration on display, ferociously willing. His grace to wash over them. He sings about a young man who decides to leave his family's farm and go to the city to make his fortune. He weeps as he sings, the whiskey and the late hour and the watery sound of his own voice taking him back to a place far from this one. He drinks deeply and tells me the full story of the song.

“The young man hates the tenant farming, you know, its dull work, the fact that they will always be poor. The young man's mother begs him to stay—they have no other children—saying that his father will be heartbroken. But the father, prideful, refuses to speak to him, and the young man departs before sunrise. The young man arrives in the city after the full day's journey and finds work at an old silk-weaver's. He works hard for nine years and then buys the business, and in nine more years he becomes prosperous and wealthy. He has his own family. One day he overhears one of his clerks take an order for a death shroud and robe in his old village. He asks the buyer who needs these things, and is told the wife of old farmer Yee. His mother. The man breaks down and weeps, asks himself how he could have ignored them so, and decides to make the journey back, to deliver the death garments himself. Perhaps, he thinks, he will finally settle the difficulty with his father. When he arrives at the house, his mother's body is being prepared by other relatives in one of the rooms. Old friends are there, talking and weeping quietly among themselves. But he can't seem to find his father. He asks a girl where he is, and she bows to this rich silk dealer and leads him to the back of the house, where the fields begin.

Where is he?
he asks,
I don't see him
.

She points to the face of the cleared hill to the east.
Up there
, she says,
where all the poor in the village are buried. Does the dead woman owe money to your family as well?

No
, he answers after a moment. He asks,
Do you know when the old man died?

Oh, no
, she tells him,
he must have passed ages ago, before I was even born
.

I say to him, “Korean stories always work like that. Everybody dies but one. And the one has little to live for.”

“But somehow he lives,” John says. “The one goes on. We're too stubborn.”

“I think we're too brave and too blind,” I answer, drinking seriously now. “I read that Korean nationals are the most rescued people from the world's mountaintops.”

“Is that true?”

“I'm not sure, but I believe it. We're too willing to take risks before we're fully prepared.”

“What about us Korean Americans?” he asks me.

I say, “We're the most rescued from burning malls.”

We both half-snort at this, half-groan, and I can see we're in the mood for talk that will only hurt and sting. Perhaps he's actually thinking about Eduardo, as I suddenly am, the bitter sleep he must have had. But I look at Kwang now, hunched over in his robe, his posture softening.

Then, another idea suddenly hits me: that I am searching out the raw spots in him, the places where he appears open, where the wounds are still fresh. I can't help myself. The last days have worn him down. It's enough to see the frail line of his calf, bare old bone, to want to lean in a little.

I ask him how May and the boys are doing.

He stops his humming. He drinks stiffly and without looking at me, says, “What do you think?”

“I think they must miss their father.”

“Oh yes,” he says, pushing up the loose terry sleeves. The old boxer again. “What else,
Park Byong-ho shih?
”

“They must wonder if he's all right,” I answer.

“Ah. And is he? What would you tell them? Is their father being himself?”

I don't answer him.

“Well, come on! You sound like you want trouble tonight. Why don't you ask me about Eduardo and his apartment? You are the only one left who hasn't! Is it because you actually respect my grief or are just afraid of what you will hear?”

“I am not afraid of you.”

John cries, “You sound so formal! Even with a little hate you are so respectful and Korean.”

“What do you want me to sound like?”

He says, in a laughing Korean,
Ah, you, I want it just like that!

“Aayeh!” I yell.

He yells.
That's much better, you! Why not yell at me? I'll allow it. Don't think of me as elder; come, strike out at me with your words, or something else. This is America, we can do this. Say it in English if you have to. Get it out in the open. You want this. I am not your father. I am not your friend. Come on, I will survive
.

He steps toward me, his hands balled into fists. We're not two feet apart. I don't move. Something in me wants to crush him but I don't move. I think I can't bear his inaction. His weeks of strange silence. I think I can bear silence from anyone but him. I want him to stand up and show his face and say something for Eduardo. And for a moment I feel that hot ore of my father's rage, what would sometimes drive him like disease or madness to hack like a demon at wet sod in the backyard. I am still silent, but I know not for long. I think, let him come at me. I'll shout him right down.

He says in Korean,
Watch out, boy
. Then he slowly backs away and sits down again. He pours more whiskey for himself and then puts down the bottle between us. I roll my chair forward, stretch out my arm, take it up. I can see that he is hurt, the instant hang in his expression. How his American life shows through so clearly. Another Korean man of his generation would not forgive the moment so quickly, if ever at all.